It’s the weird types that give photographers a bad rap. You know, the kind that’ll aim more than just his lens at a model. In New York City, photographer Jackson Hodges is making waves by having models keep their clothes on. Rather than have them strip down to their skivvies, Hodges wants the models he works with to feel as though they can be accepted with clothes on.

“You know, I just said, ‘Hey. How are you?'” Hodges told us over the phone. “She really responded to that, and as she told me about her day, she started to strip. And I told her that wouldn’t be necessary.”

Shortly after the highest court in Massachusetts declared upskirt photos fair game, smartphone companies responded by releasing a firmware update that would brick devices that took such photographs. There was a sharp uptick in upskirt images uploaded to the likes of Facebook and Instagram, but there was just as steep a falloff the firmware updates were pushed out. Continue reading…

John Robinson, a NYC-based photographer, immediately knew something was wrong when he went gallery hopping Thursday night. There was a photo exhibition, and all of the images looked fairly familiar. Upon closer inspection, these images were Robinson’s, only they were turned upside down. Robinson immediately called his lawyer and subsequently filed suit against Dan Thompson, the man who turned everything upside down. Continue reading…

Several days after acquiring Whatsapp, Facebook has announced that it has reached a deal with Snapchat for $20 billion. The move came after Snapchat realized how much it could stand to make if it were acquired by the blue titan of social media. Snapchat’s CEO Michael Williams restarted talks with Zuckerberg and the two solidified the terms of the acquisition. Unfortunately, a security leak led to millions of lewd photos going public. Continue reading…

Earlier this week, Sigma announced its new semi-futuristic Quattro series of cameras: the DP1, DP2 and DP3. With new innards and a completely redesigned exterior, the Quattro cameras have left everybody scratching their heads. The design suggests that this is what a camera would look like had it been made on another planet, and Hasselblad is penning its farewell. Continue reading…

The Fujifilm X-T1 is everything the Nikon Df could have been. With a beautifully vintage appeal, the X-T1 is set to carve out its place both in Fujifilm’s oeuvre and the greater photographic space. Of all the camera companies, Nikon is perhaps the only one paying the closest attention to Fujifilm’s latest offering. Nikon’s internal memos reveal that the Df will soon see its final days thanks in no small part to the X-T1.

“We just can’t compete,” wrote Nikon COO Alex Matthews. “How did we not come up with the X-T1?”

Weekend Humor isn’t meant to be taken seriously. So don’t. We’re serious.

Instagram has been at cruising altitude since its acquisition by Facebook nearly two years ago. With the same 16 filters and more than 150 million users, the photo sharing service is steadily approaching a plateau, if not already there. Instagram doesn’t see much in the way of updates, and it was a year ago that Willow was added to the roster. In a recent interview, Kevin Morton, one of the lead designers at Instagram, revealed that the company is developing its filters into film stock.

“We realized that of the billions and billions of photos uploaded, most of them don’t need the filters,” Morton told us over the phone. “What good is bacon in Hefe, really? And all of those selfies- God, I hate that word. Go find some college junior studying photography and eating ramen in his dorm, and give him $20 for a portrait. Tell him you’d give him more, but you need to buy more ramen.”

Morton spearheaded the effort to hire some of the best in the film business in order to facilitate the filter-to-film transition. Kodak was the first company Morton called, and upon offering a living wage, he had eight new employees, all veterans in the film business. With the designs behind the filters readily available, the film division set to making film stock in those styles.

“We know we’ve caused a divide in the photographic world. An iPhone, something interesting, and X-Pro II does not make you a photographer,” said Morton. “You can the same effects, but now you have to learn how to use a goddamn camera since we’re striking the filters from the app.”

Instagram will remain intact, but will no longer offer any filters, which will make #nofilter moot. Morton urges users to focus on making compelling images without having to rely on pseudo film grain.

In October 2013, Max Donovan was sifting through photos from a shoot earlier in the day. The photographer sent him the RAWs of a model that would eventually make the front page. Some fashion designer somewhere made a thing that a bunch of folks said they liked, so this magazine hired this photographer to make it all happen. It was up to Donovan to determine the sequence of photos and how much they would reflect reality. What he did cost him his job.

In the pantheon of photographic undertakings that make people sound more interesting than they are comes a new kind of project: Pooches of NY. The project took shape when 20-year-old photographer Donald Matheson realized that he couldn’t stop taking photos of his dog. The photos were fairly repetitive, so he decided to take his lens beyond the confines of his front yard. His candid portraits of dogs on the streets of his hometown of Astoria, Queens quickly became something much larger. Continue reading…

Weekend Humor isn’t meant to be taken seriously. So don’t, ya rube.
Each new year brings with it a slate of resolutions. Most fall by the wayside, but some – though they are few and far in between – are upheld. With 2014 a few days old, a coalition of cats led by Mr. Sprinkles has resolved to take back the internet by turning the camera back on their so-called “owners”. After a successful lobbying campaign, Mr. Sprinkles has secured the release of the Sony CC1; the CC stands for Cat Camera. Continue reading…

Retouching has largely affected young girls in that distorts their sense of self. It’s gotten so bad as of late that South Park lampooned the whole notion of retouching in a recent episode. A distorted body image hasn’t been as big of a problem for men as it has for women, but a new campaign titled “Real Men” aims to turn the whole retouching issue on its head. Continue reading…

In an effort to help photographers discover their true nature, B&H Photo will offer a plaid shirt with each camera purchase. The program, originally conceived by B&H’s general manager Don Lefkowitz, aims to both invigorate and advance the careers of nascent photographers. The initial selection of shirts is limited, but that will soon expand as B&H forges relationships with different clothing companies. Currently, B&H has an agreement with Uniqlo.

“I was at this fashion event,” Lefkowitz said over the phone. “And all the photographers were wearing plaid. Not all the same color scheme obviously, but it was plaid everywhere!”

Given B&H’s status as the place for photographers, Lefkowitz reasoned that he could play a stronger role in photographer’s lives by giving them the essential element of a photographer’s existence beyond the camera. That essential element is the plaid shirt. Perhaps this is because each vertex represents the intersection of creative vision and technology. Or maybe it’s just because all the lines create myriad frames.

Lefkowitz introduced the idea at a meeting with the various department managers, and they offered muted agreement. One of the executives suggested just giving those photographers studios in Williamsburg, but that was quickly ruled impractical. Shirts would be far easier to offer.

“Why send them somewhere else?” Lefkowitz said. “Why not give them everything they need right here?”

The shirts, which B&H will start offering on Jan. 1, 2014, will have a small buttoned pocket on each sleeve for storing SD cards. If you purchase a vintage lens outside of the kit option, you’ll also get a beanie. If you purchase a second lens alongside everything else, you’ll get nonprescription eyeglasses. If you happen to add a leather camera bag at the end of all of that, you’ll get a pack of American Spirits.

If you’re daring enough to buy a Holga, you’ll get two plaid shirts.

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Citing a recent spate of copyright infringement cases, the photography collective X-Fotos has successful created a registry for copyright infringers. The photographers combed through archives of legal cases to compile a list of names that they retroactively registered, and for any future cases, the infringers will have to add their names to the list. X-Fotos hopes that the registry will stem the rising tide of infringement cases.

Word on the street has it that the Chicago Sun-Times is in talks to rehire a handful of the photographers fired in May. If the plan works, four photographers will be rehired, and the rest will each get a lump sum of $2,000. The four that will rejoin the Sun-Times will have to, among other things, do extensive video work. The Sun-Times, however, has added a clause that will require the rehires to use iPhones exclusively. Continue reading…

The a7 and a7R have been making the press rounds before they’re made available to the public. Here at Phoblographer HQ, we’ve had to hire a full-time janitorial staff to mop up all the drool that’s flooded our office space. The quality of the cameras have caught nearly everyone off-guard, and even Sony seems to be reeling from its own success. The lens division at Sony has nearly thrown up a white flag because the cameras are too good, and Sony has issued an official apology.

Instagram has recently banned more hashtags in effort to squash drug sales. It’s high time Instagram finally did something to at least try to quell nefarious activity. Those banned hashtags, however, have found new life in a new service called Instatag. The illicit tags join the general tags: #iphone, #photography and #popular among them. The service hit a brick wall on iOS, but has been released on Android.

Citing a trend towards the smallest possible form factor for cameras, several consumers banded together to form “The cameras are too damn small” group. Jimmy McMillan’s “The rent is too damn high party” served as the backbone for TCATDS. Their mission is simple: to bring cameras back to a usable size. They’ve been working on an extensive ad campaign to persuade camera manufacturers to abandon unnecessarily small form factors.

It all began when Dan Matthews received a gift from his fiancee. It was a very small interchangeable lens camera whose manufacturer we will not name, lest we should trip some alarm. He said the gesture was “sweet” and that “she shouldn’t have.” What he thought was, “What am I supposed to do with a model camera?” When his fiancee saw that he wasn’t taking any photos with it, she told him it’s functioning camera.

High school yearbooks rank among the most unread texts in the entirety of Western literature. Aside from being a ramshackle collection of awkward memories, the yearbook is a terrible picture book for many. The dread that accompanies Picture Day is so palpable that the lunch lady could scoop it onto your tray. With acne’s tragic status as a perennial problem, Tiffen decided to engineer a new kind of filter, one that could make pimples, zits and boils disappear for a fraction of a second. Continue reading…

Earlier this year, Yahoo! gave its flagging photo service an extreme makeover. With a sleek tiled design and a terabyte for all of those selfies, Flickr reentered public consciousness. Flickr was cool again, and even though most “groups” haven’t been updated in four years, everything seemed okay. The toolbar wasn’t noticed at first, but steadily, people took issue with it. There isn’t any conceivable way to get rid of the vestige of Web 1.0. Toolbars were only ever found on your grandmother’s computer, but for some reason, Yahoo! brought back the granny-bar in full force. Flickr’s users have been less than satisfied. Continue reading…

Children, by virtue of their existence, drive up camera sales. A good number of parents, however, pick the one that will give them the “best pictures”, and most side for a DSLR because “that’s what the pros use”. Given the demands of child-rearing, parents often don’t have the time to use the camera in a way that would really warrant the purchase. A parent will use a point-and-shoot and a Canon 5D Mark III in a similar fashion. The latter will give you higher resolution, but the former will fit in a purse or a fanny pack depending on your inclination. With this knowledge in mind, Olympus is introducing the OMD-CFP, Camera For Parents. Continue reading…

The paparazzo is an often reviled figure in A-list circles. Once Alec Baldwin finds himself staring at the business end of a telephoto lens, a white hot rage forms in the core of his being and surges out into his hands. “Fear the Baldwin” has become an oft-repeated phrase in celebrity headhunter circles, but given the need to put food on the table, most resign themselves going out yet again to sit in a café for eight hours at a time. The divide between the person behind the camera and the one in front of it wasn’t always there. A food fight between Felice Quinto, the grandpapa of all paparazzi, and some kid in the 1940s led to the great schism.